Belly Dance as an Embodying Activity?: A Test of the Embodiment Model of Positive Body Image

The study aimed to test Menzel and Levine’s (2011) embodiment theory of positive body image in the context of belly dance. Participants were 213 women from Adelaide, South Australia. They comprised 112 belly dancers recruited from two belly dance schools, and a sample of 101 college women who had never participated in belly dance. Participants completed questionnaire measures of positive body image, body dissatisfaction, self-objectification, and enjoyment of sexualization. It was found that belly dancers scored higher on positive body image and lower on body dissatisfaction and self-objectification than the college students. There was, however, no difference between groups in enjoyment of sexualization. Importantly, in support of the embodiment model, the effect of belly dance group on positive body image was mediated by reduced self-objectification. It was concluded that belly dance represents an embodying activity, one associated with a number of benefits for its practioners, including positive body image.     

Dancers Exult at the Awakening

Abstract. This article explores the art form of dance as a metaphor for the teaching of theology. Employing the work of Maria Harris, the author contends that there are seven elements of dance than can serve as metaphors for teachers of theology: preparation, rhythm, movement, expectancy, response, embodiment, and performance. Each dance element is described in detail, and the correlations between specific elements of dance and how one might teach theology are presented as possible methodological steps for teaching.     

“具身”涵义的理论辨析

“具身”是当代心理学和认知科学领域的热门话题, 其基本涵义是指认知对身体的依赖性。经典认知科学主张“非具身”, 认为认知是一种信息的表征与加工, 从本质上讲与承载它的身体无关。“弱具身”强调了认知对身体的依赖性, 但是却保留了认知的计算和表征功能。“强具身”则极力主张认知是被身体作用于世界的活动塑造出来的, 身体的特殊细节造就了认知的特殊性。在怎样理解“具身”方面, 存在着不同的解释。从本文作者的观点来看, 具身的性质和特征表现在4个方面：(1)身体参与了认知, 影响了思维、判断、态度和情绪等心智过程。(2)我们对于客观世界的知觉依赖于身体作用于世界的活动, 身体的活动影响着关于客观世界表象的形成。(3)意义源于身体, 抽象的意义有着身体感觉—运动系统的基础。(4)身体的不同倾向于造就不同的思维和认识方式。有关具身的研究将从理论和实践两个层面对心理学产生冲击。     

Dancing faith: contemporary Christian dance in Norway

ABSTRACT

Although dance is a common religious expression, its place in the Christian tradition has been contested. In modern Protestant Norway, dance has mostly been considered irrelevant to church life or even sinful. In recent decades, however, dance has become increasingly common in Norwegian churches. The present analysis of empirical data on dance in Christian settings in contemporary Norway is based on participant observation and interviews. While younger dancers (born after 1990) consider it natural to dance in church, and are usually welcome to do so, older participants have met significant resistance. When dancing, dancers find personal meaning (wellbeing, processing emotions and life events), social meaning (communication, belonging), and religious meaning (contact with God, prayer, growth). Dance emerges as a part of lived religion that clearly highlights how bodies matter, and how spiritualities are gendered, in this contribution to understanding the embodied dimensions of religion.     

Improv and the Angel: Disability Dance,Embodied Ethics,and Jewish Biblical Narrative

Disability dance lays claim to the provocative possibilities of the disabled body, raising profound questions about the politics of art, affect, and embodiment. For scholars of religion, disability dance is a powerful—and as yet unrecognized—site for probing the sacrality and ethics enacted in disability culture. This article brings the biblical tale of Jacob and the angel into conversation with a contemporary performance, “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight,” an intimate duet between choreographer and performer Jess Curtis and Clare Cunningham, an internationally acclaimed dancer who explores the artistry of lived disability experience. Using dance as a hermeneutic invitation to draw out ethical insights into risk, consent, and intimacy, I offer a disability‐sensitive reading of Genesis 32—reading the angel as a body whose presence attests to the brilliant shock of disability difference and probing the psychic and somatic transformation that unfolds when Jacob comes into kinesthetic contact with disability and the sacred.     

Experiencing affect through site-specific dance

Our embodied experiences of affect, feeling and emotion within the context of site-specific dance are the focus of this article. The specific sites of our dance are designed gardens and our performances are offered within the context of an arts festival. In performing within these gardens, we aim to complement and enhance the site through our embodiment. Both as dancers in, and as audience members of dance, we recognize that affect, feeling and emotion arise during special live performance events. We understand affect as a fluid and relational, collective experience that extends beyond our individual experiences as performers to being shared with and between particular audiences at particular times and places. However, it is often difficult to express these embodied, collective experiences. Drawing on a feminist and phenomenological approach, we offer vignettes of key moments in these performances to illustrate the affective practices in our work. These vignettes draw on moments when we felt we shared an experience with audiences, supported by written responses, recorded anecdotal comments from audience members, and discussions between performers. We conclude by reflecting on how we might offer our community an enhanced emotional experience of the gardens.     

Effects of relative embodiment in lexical and semantic processing of verbs

Research examining semantic richness effects in visual word recognition has shown that multiple dimensions of meaning are activated in the process of word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). This research has, however, been limited to nouns. In the present research we extended the semantic richness approach to verb stimuli in order to investigate how verb meanings are represented. We characterized a dimension of relative embodiment for verbs, based on the bodily sense described by Borghi and Cimatti (2010), and collected ratings on that dimension for 687 English verbs. The relative embodiment ratings revealed that bodily experience was judged to be more important to the meanings of some verbs (e.g., dance, breathe) than to others (e.g., evaporate, expect). We then tested the effects of relative embodiment and imageability on verb processing in lexical decision (Experiment 1), action picture naming (Experiment 2), and syntactic classification (Experiment 3). In all three experiments results showed facilitatory effects of relative embodiment, but not imageability: latencies were faster for relatively more embodied verbs, even after several other lexical variables were controlled. The results suggest that relative embodiment is an important aspect of verb meaning, and that the semantic richness approach holds promise as a strategy for investigating other aspects of verb meaning.     

The role of human body movements in mate selection

It is common scientific knowledge, that most of what we say within a conversation is not only expressed by the words' meaning alone, but also through our gestures, postures, and body movements. This non-verbal mode is possibly rooted firmly in our human evolutionary heritage, and as such, some scientists argue that it serves as a fundamental assessment and expression tool for our inner qualities. Studies of nonverbal communication have established that a universal, culture-free, non-verbal sign system exists, that is available to all individuals for negotiating social encounters. Thus, it is not only the kind of gestures and expressions humans use in social communication, but also the way these movements are performed, as this seems to convey key information about an individual's quality. Dance, for example, is a special form of movement, which can be observed in human courtship displays. Recent research suggests that people are sensitive to the variation in dance movements, and that dance performance provides information about an individual's mate quality in terms of health and strength. This article reviews the role of body movement in human non-verbal communication, and highlights its significance in human mate preferences in order to promote future work in this research area within the evolutionary psychology framework.     

The dynamic and recursive interplay of embodiment and narrative identity

Although there is an increase in research into how narrative identity interrelates with embodiment, the mechanisms underlying this interplay are hardly addressed. In this paper, I target this hiatus in the literature by proposing two mechanisms that can help to (non-exhaustively) elucidate the dynamic interplay of narrative identity and embodiment. I start by briefly sketching the debate so far and then go on to argue that the way narrative self-understanding affects our embodiment can be understood on the model of narrative self-programming. After that I turn to the other side of the interaction. Drawing on research in ecological psychology and phenomenology, I show how embodiment affects our narrative self-understanding through the way in which we engage with affordances in our narrative background. After that I highlight the dynamic and recursive character of this interplay. I end with some conclusions and unresolved issues.     

Transforming Spirituality in Artistic Leisure: How the Spiritual Meaning of Belly Dance Changes Over Time

Studies show that different dimensions of religiosity change throughout the life course. Yet, we have little information about how spirituality that some people experience outside of formal religious organizations may change. The purpose of this study is to examine how spirituality associated with artistic leisure may emerge or decline over time. Drawing from two waves of semistructured qualitative interviews conducted five years apart, I examine how the spirituality dancers associate with belly dance changes over time and factors associated with those transformations. Rather than emerging, findings show that whether dancers instill belly dance with spirituality remains stable or decreases. Furthermore, much of the decrease in the spiritual meaning that dancers link to belly dance can be understood in the context of their changing involvement in the dance, different meanings they attach to belly dance, revisiting their personal beliefs about spirituality, and expanding their spiritual outlets.     

Emotional clich��s and authentic passions: A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory of emotion

This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.     

Alfred Schutz: Transcendence, Symbolic Intersubjectivity, and Moral Value

This article uses the writings of Alfred Schutz as catalysts to analyze three distinctive modes of transcendences operative in human experience. Particular attention is given to the role symbolic awareness plays in the formation and embodiment of moral value. I argue that Schutz's theory of symbols is helpful in illuminating the way shared horizons of value meaning and collective moral purpose can occur in relation to cultural and geographical anonymity. I then draw upon the moral theory of H. Richard Niebuhr to highlight the positive role that symbolic value horizons play in preventing ethnocentric world-views and in promoting common centers of discourse and visions of wholeness.     

Static images with different induced intensities of human body movements affect subjective time

Modulation of subjective time was examined using static images eliciting perceptions of different intensities of body movement. Undergraduate students were exposed to photographs of dancer sculptures in different dance positions for 36 sec. and asked to estimate the exposure duration. Lower movement intensities were related to shorter estimated durations. Mean durations for images of unmoving dancers were underestimated and for dancers taking a ballet step were overestimated. Temporal estimations were also related to the order of presentation of the stimuli, which suggested that subjective time estimations were influenced by the experimental context. Subjective time is related not only to the visual perception of moving images, but also of elicited perceptions of movement in static images, suggesting an embodiment effect on subjective time estimation.     

A Civil Art: The Persuasive Moral Voice of Oscar Romero

When moral or religious teachings have public and political effects, analysis usually focuses on the message, but attention to the manner in which the teachings are communicated is equally important in understanding their power to influence the course of events. Oscar Romero's particular style of moral discourse was remarkably effective for three reasons: First, his moral reasoning resonated with Salvadoran identity. It was intelligible within those reigning assumptions about national history and territory that could actually move a public to action. Second, his moral judgments were timely. Romero sought to discern what was possible for the Salvadoran public at a given moment. Third, Romero had integrity as public figure. He lived in such a way that his life, and especially his death, became an exemplary embodiment of the larger religious narrative that both grounded his ethics and gave meaning to the nation.     

Existential meaning's role in the enhancement of hope and prevention of depressive symptoms

The authors confirmed that existential meaning has a unique relationship with and can prospectively predict levels of hope and depressive symptoms within a population of college students. Baseline measures of explicit meaning (i.e., an individual's self-reported experience of a sense of coherence and purpose in life) and implicit meaning (i.e., an individual's self-reported embodiment of the factors that are normatively viewed as comprising a meaningful life) explained significant amounts of variance in hope and depressive symptoms 2 months later beyond the variance explained by baseline levels of hope/depression, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion, and social desirability. The authors discuss implications of these findings for the field of mental health treatment and suggest ways of influencing individuals' experience of existential meaning.     

From movement to dance

This article begins with a summary phenomenological analysis of movement in conjunction with the question of “quality” in movement. It then specifies the particular kind of memory involved in a dancer’s memorization of a dance. On the basis of the phenomenological analysis and specification of memory, it proceeds to a clarification of meaning in dance. Taking its clue from the preceding sections, the concluding section of the article sets forth reasons why present-day cognitive science is unable to provide insights into dance, notably because being largely tethered to happenings in the brain, it lacks foundational grounding in experience, specifically, the actual experience of movement, which is to say in kinesthesia.     

When is a cognitive system embodied?

For cognitive systems, embodiment appears to be of crucial importance. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be able to define embodiment in a way that would prevent it from also covering its trivial interpretations such as mere situatedness in complex environments. The paper focuses on the definition of embodiment, especially whether physical embodiment is necessary and/or sufficient for cognitive systems. Cognition is characterized as a continuous complex process rather than ahistorical logical capability. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between cognitive embodiment and the issues of understanding, representation and task specification.     

Introduction: A ‘Curvature of Social Space’

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through ‘ritual’ and ‘festal’; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trance’); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the ‘vibe’ and ‘tribes’); and EDMC as a new ‘spirituality of life’. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘tragic’, and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an ‘implosion of meaning’, recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of ‘religion’.     

Embodied experience and linguistic meaning

What role does people's embodied experiences have in their use and understanding of meaning? Most theories in cognitive science view meaning in terms of propositional structures that may be combined to form higher-order complexes in representing the meanings of conversations and texts. A newer approach seeks to capture meaning in terms of high-dimensional semantic space. Both views reflect the idea that meaning is best understood as abstract and disembodied symbols. My aim in this article is to make the case for an embodied view of linguistic meaning. This view provides a challenge to traditional approaches to linguistic meaning (although may not necessarily be entirely incompatible with them). I discuss several new lines of research from both linguistics and psychology that explore the importance of embodied perception and action in people's understanding of words, phrases, and texts. These data provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that significant aspects of thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment.     

隐喻的具身性与文化性

自从Lakoff和Johnson在《Philosophy in the Flesh —The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought》一书中将认知科学划分为第一代认知科学与第二代认知科学以来,隐喻成为了心理学家、语言学家和哲学家研究的热点领域之一。隐喻的构造基于我们的具身体验,基于我们的文化背景。隐喻的具身性与文化性是相互融合、不可分割的。